Abstract
Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist who sought asylum in Australia. Following Australia’s ‘turn back the boats’ policy and the resultant ‘off-shore processing’, he was detained in an Australian facility on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) in 2013 and held there for six years. He wrote a book, No Friend But the Mountains, about his experiences. Boochani’s book provides the perspective of camp inmate, partly through a poetic or novelist lens, partly through a sociopolitical one. His book helps to understand under what circumstances a person can survive the dehumanizing conditions of a camp. Boochani’s book spoke to us three authors of this chapter in different ways, depending on our professional training, our interests, and our personal backgrounds. This is reflected in the conversation we have recorded here.
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Namer, Y., Düzen, N.E., Razum, O. (2022). What the Mountains Told Us: A Conversation on Behrouz Boochani’s Book “No Friend But the Mountains”. In: Razum, O., Dawson, A., Eckenwiler, L., Wild, V. (eds) Refugee Camps in Europe and Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12877-6_6
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